Speaking Sensis

Sensis’ and Yelp partner to create new opportunities for Australia’s local searchers.

Today is an exciting day for Sensis as we announce our latest ground-breaking partnership between Yellow Pages® and Yelp, the global leader in local reviews and ratings. Together we’ll work with Yelp to launch an Australian version of the Yelp website, where Aussie’s will be invited to rate their dealings with local businesses and write reviews about their experiences.

Ratings and reviews are growing in popularity in the Australian market place. Did you know that, according to the recent Sensis Social Media Report, almost two thirds of social network users (63 per cent) read online reviews before they make buying decisions? Or that they read an average of six reviews each time? Given this enormous interest, we believe this partnership will be a huge win for the Australian community.

When Yelp launches in Australia they will integrate Sensis’ Yellow Pages® local business listing data into yelp.com.au.and, tap into our leading local sales force to launch and embed yelp.com.au in the Australian market. 

Not only does this mean the launch of a leading new ratings and review website in Australia, but through the partnership, Sensis will syndicate Yelp content, ratings and reviews to yellowpages.com.au, Yellow Pages® Mobile and the Yellow Pages® iPhone application.

So our advertisers can be really excited about the opportunities this partnership presents to them in the form of a deeper way to engage with potential customers online.

Yelp is a really exciting business to work with and I’m personally looking forward to the next couple of months as we work together to bring this leading product to market.

Yelp launched in 2004 and has rapidly expanded its user-generated ratings and reviews websites across North America and Europe. In fact, in June 2011, Yelp had more than 53 million unique visitors worldwide and to date more than 20 million local reviews of businesses have been posted to Yelp sites.

We anticipate yelp.com.au will be fully operational by the end of 2011 with Sensis’ Yellow Pages® media advisors offering Yelp advertising options to customers in 2012.

Simon B

Hi.

It’s been a while since my last update. You might be forgiven for thinking I went into hibernation after the Saints lost the Grand Final back in October. But the truth is we’ve been head down putting the finishing touches on a Yellow Pages® transformation that has been more than two years in the making.

Today, I’m really proud to announce the results of that transformation to you. I’m particularly excited to say that today’s announcement isn’t just a wish list of future actions. The more than a dozen new services and countless improvements I’m announcing are all ready to roll. So is the total re-invention of our go to market strategy and stark re-focus on the needs of our customers we’re also announcing.

And I think this evolution of our strategy ticks all the boxes for our customers and shareholders. It:
• Puts SMEs in the drivers seat by taking the complexity out of building sophisticated multi-platform marketing strategies
• Makes marketing more accountable than it’s ever been
• Puts Sensis in a competitive position no-one else can match
• Helps to drive and monetise the continual growth of digital media
• Creates new revenue streams from existing customers and adjacent markets

THE DIGITAL DILEMMA

This strategy has been developed to specifically meet the needs of Australia’s SME sector.

As we all know, the Internet has created a new world of opportunity for advertisers. You only have to look at the rapid growth of search, local search, social media, video and group buying sites to know that.

But digital media has created some serious challenges as well – particularly for SMEs. What sort of marketing is right for me? How do I manage a vast range of marketing from a long list of vendors? How can I measure the impact in a clean clear way?

These challenges – which we call ‘the digital dilemma’ – are seriously holding back the SME sector’s ability to leverage digital media. For example, 55% of businesses who have the Internet say they have a lack of expertise or knowledge, and 62% say they don’t measure advertising ROI, with over half of them saying it’s either too time consuming, too hard or they don’t know how [1].

Clearly, these businesses need help to get the most out of today’s advertising environment. They need a 360 degree service that will let them reach out wherever they need to be and tailor campaigns that reach their customers no matter where they search. And that’s where Yellow Pages® steps in.

YELLOW PAGES®: MARKETING MADE EASY

Today, we’re taking the next step in our digital journey with an exciting new 360 degree local search program from Yellow Pages®. Its  designed to help SMEs find more customers more easily in this rapidly changing marketing environment.

As our posters say… its Yellow Pages®, but not as you know it.

The strategy focuses on three key areas of service – Presence, Performance and Empowerment.

Presence involves a rapid expansion of our network to drive digital usage growth (Yellow Pages® digital usage grew by 50% over the last year) and the advertiser ROI that usage generates.

Presence begins with strengthening our Yellow Pages® Online site. We have significant deepened the content base of our business profile pages. This includes the ability to publish more of your business information, enhanced new Purely Mobile Business and Platinum advertiser products and a new video production facility. Your profile page can now also include social media feeds. For the first time, you can update your Yellow Pages® profile page real time, simply by updating your social media pages.

On top of this, we’re announcing an eye-catching new series of services that are designed to extend the reach of your Yellow Pages network even further. These include:

Yellow Pages® iPad: A ground-breaking new iPad app that combines online, print and map-based business search all in one application.

SPA Network: SPA stands for Sensis Priority Advertiser. For the first time, Yellow Pages customers can gain priority on Whereis®, Citysearch®, Voice and a range of other Sensis services which, combined, drive over 10m visits a month. We’re also expanding the reach SPA can offer with new voice products, such as IQ, the 1234 iPhone app and Sock Assist, as well as the exciting new CitySearch® iPhone app.

API: Our agreements with Google and Bing have delivered incredible value to advertisers by channeling even more leads to them. Our new applications program interface will expand on this by making it easy for developers to create new sites and apps using Yellow Pages® content.

SEO and SEM: Speaking of search engines, we’re also ramping up our SEM and SEO programs to drive even more traffic through search engines to our Yellow Pages advertisers.

Beyond this, we’re releasing a new series of products for companies focused on marketing their web sites. Today, less than 10% use search marketing. Our new ClickManager and Yellow Pages® Digital Plus services will help these businesses optimise their digital profiles.

For those businesses that want a web site, we can now offer the new SiteSmart web site creation and management service. And through our recent acquisition of Quotify we can now offer quotation services to businesses all around Australia. Already, Quotify serves buyers and sellers in 12 different product categories across its 40 sites.

Finally, we’ve also launched a new group buying site Yellow Pages® Offers. This site will give SMEs in a growing number of regions the ability to offer special deals to potential buyers.

Performance talks about the way we’re going to wrap all of these products up into a single, detailed ROI report that helps businesses makes sense of their marketing investment. Customers will be able to see how their advertising is performing… not just counting clicks, but tracking real sales leads all the way to their business. To facilitate this, we are expanding our successful metered ad program from 7,000 ads to half a million!

EMPOWERMENT

Empowerment involves the total re-invention of our go to market strategy. Customers will benefit from:

• A simplified product ladder that reduces our product range from seven to just two;

• A wide range of simple options made accessible through value bundles that help marketers personalise their marketing to meet their needs.

• A stronger focus on customer satisfaction which includes the establishment of a Customer Satisfaction Council and a focus on easy order management and a single bill.

• New sales and customer tools to make life easier, including the iPad based PrepSmart prepping tool for our people, enhanced collateral, and online Advertiser and Customer Service centres

• And all of these initiatives will be backed by a total re-alignment of our business to meet customer needs. We’ve developed a greater understanding of our customers through deeper segmentation and research and we’ve aligned everything from sales to marketing to collateral to service to the needs of our customer base.

RIGHT TIME, RIGHT PLACE

So that’s our strategy, Marketing Made Easy, in a nutshell and it’s ready to roll. I must say that the enhanced customer value and differentiation this strategy offers, together with the exceptional commitment our people have shown, has made this one of the most satisfying programs I’ve ever worked on.

But I don’t want you to think this announcement is an ‘overnight sensation’. In fact, it is the culmination more than two years of work and planning. It began with the roll-out of our iGen system, which has made many of the initiatives we are announcing – such as pricing, bundling and improved product development – possible. And there have been a range of other initiatives, such as our growing focus on industry partnerships and the progressive rollout of our mobile services, that have laid the foundations on which today’s new program is built.

That’s what I mean by ‘right time’. The time is right to now take this step.

But what about ‘right place’? By that I simply mean that there is no-one in a better position to bring a totally holistic, 360 degree advertising service like this to market than Sensis. Sensis is already Australia’s largest locally owned online advertising company and we have more business customers than just about any other local media company. Furthermore, we have the capabilities, such as multi-platform publishing, sales relationships, brands and content to bring this incredibly diverse, but simple, marketing program to life.

And, of course, we also have the print directories which you might note haven’t been mentioned so far. Our print directories continue to deliver millions of real leads to Australian businesses every day. As such, they remain a powerful source of advertiser ROI and competitive differentiation for Sensis. We’ll be working to maintain that position into the future.

CONCLUSION

So, that’s it. A comprehensive and exciting new commitment to our customers. Powerful, but simple, new ways to help Australia’s SMEs make the most of today’s changing marketing world. A bold new long term growth strategy for shareholders.

That’s what we mean by Marketing Made Easy.

See you next time.

[1] Sensis eBusiness Report, August 2010

As a self-professed iPad convert, not only is this week exciting for me personally but it also marks a milestone for the team here at Sensis as we’ve just launched the much anticipated Yellow Pages iPad app.

The app, developed by our talented in-house team over the past few months, brings together for the first time our digital and print content in the one device. It also adds another layer to our multi-channel platform strategy – now spanning print, online, mobile, search engines, iPhone, Android (to name a few!) and now… iPad!

So, the reach of Yellow Pages print and digital products extends to another new audience this week which means Yellow Pages advertisers now have even more ways to reach consumers, and people searching for businesses now have a new way to access the information.

A bit about the new app – it’s free to download and includes all the information you’d expect from Yellow Pages, and it comes in two versatile views so you can choose how to search and view businesses on your iPad:

Business listings are displayed on an interactive combined map and list view

Or you can check out the business ‘ad view’ which displays Yellow Pages book ads based on relevance to the search term – in other words, it’s the digital version of a print search for many of our ads

The app allows you to FIND businesses nearby, SHARE them with friends and SAVE them for later.

And we’re not talking about one-line listings here either! You should check out the content – the listings can include contact details, product and service information, a photo gallery, videos and links to social media.

The app lets you search by name, category or keyword and as you type a list of possible options are presented so you’ll find what you’re looking for faster. There are a number of other helpful features:

See results for businesses ‘nearest to you’ (your current location) or at a predefined location

Share listings with your friends using Send to Mobile or Send to Email

Save business details to ‘contacts’ so you can access them later

We can’t wait to get this app out amongst the iPad community and hear what people think – so make sure you download it now and post your feedback after you’ve used it.

You’ll find the app under Yellow Pages in the App store.

Hi again. Well, Winter is here with some great rain for our gardens and dams. There’s a lot of exciting things happening at Sensis. And, to top it all off, St Kilda’s nudging the top of the AFL ladder. Could life get any better? In this update, I wanted to share with you some comments on our two speed economy, an exciting couple of months on the innovation front and a few beautiful sets of numbers.

Australia’s two-speed economy
We seem to have hit an uncertain cross-road in the Australian economy. There are signs of a solid return to growth and businesses in many sectors are performing well.

At the same time, however, confidence has dipped among Australia’s small to medium enterprises (SMEs). While SME confidence grew strongly from its historic lows during the GFC, the June Sensis® Business Index reported a significant quarterly drop in confidence. Confidence is still above the lows of last year, but it is concerning that it has fallen so far: especially when you consider that the chief concern among SMEs is ‘lack of work/sales’.

As we all know, the Federal Election is not likely to be far away. Given the importance of Australia’s SME sector and the millions of people it employs, I sincerely hope that the policies of all political parties will reflect a real focus on support for the SME sector.

A busy time for Yellow Pages®…
On a more positive note, we’re currently finalising the distribution of our Yellow Pages® print Regional and Living Local directories to households and businesses around Australia. As I mentioned in the last report, I’m proud to say that we have taken responsibility for the carbon footprint of all Yellow Pages® and White Pages® print and online directories from 1 February 2010. We will offset the carbon emissions through Government accredited providers and projects in Australia.

At the same time, the 2010 Yellow Pages® metropolitan campaign is now well and truly underway. This is one of Australia’s largest customer engagement operations with more than 1,000 consultants developing solutions that help hundreds of thousands of Australian businesses connect with the well over six million potential customers who use our print directories every month¹. That’ real muscle for Australia’s SMEs.

Of course, Yellow Pages®’ value extends far beyond the print directory these days, with millions more searches of Yellow Pages® advertising being conducted in online, mobile and voice every month.

… and a busy time in the labs as well
And we’re committed to building on that value. The evidence of this lies in the ‘run’ of digital innovations we’ve delivered recently. All these new releases further improve the quality and ease of use of our services for buyers and sellers. With so much to report, it’s hard to know where to start, so let’s just jump in.

Early June saw the launch of Yellow Pages®, White Pages® and Whereis® sites specifically designed for the Apple iPad. It was great to be able to launch these tailored sites (complete with gestural interactions like panning and zooming with a swipe or pinch of your fingers) in time for the iPad launch.

We’ve also released upgrades to our Yellow Pages®, White Pages® and Whereis® Mobile sites. All three incorporated auto suggest features to make searching easier for users as well as gestural mapping for high end Android and iPhone supported phones. On top of this, we added a more seamless click to call feature for the White Pages® and Yellow Pages® sites. In the case of White Pages® Mobile, this dropped the call wait time from around seven seconds to practically zero. And we also incorporated a range of new features for Yellow Pages® advertisers, including text descriptors, business logo and image gallery capabilities.

More recently, we launched a new social networking feature to White Pages® Online. ‘Save and Share’ lets you save interesting White Pages® listings or share them on Twitter or Facebook. Save and Share is already proving popular, with thousands of shares and a large number of resultant click backs from social networks to White Pages® Online. That, of course, means more potential leads for White Pages® advertisers.

Another exciting online announcement was the launch of an upgraded Bing search engine, which can now include Yellow Pages® listings (in the form of a ‘5-pack’) as part of its search results. This means Yellow Pages® advertisers can now be searched for on both Bing and Bing Maps.

We’ve loaded Citysearch® restaurant listings into Whereis.com. This has the joint benefit of improving the richness of the Whereis® experience, while helping to drive more potential customers to Citysearch® advertisers.

And we’ve launched online behavioural targeting for MediaSmart advertisers®. This gives advertisers the ability to deliver more relevant advertising to people using the MediaSmart® online network, which includes Sensis and Telstra sites and an extensive roster of third party sites.

Finally, we’re seeing great advertiser uptake of our bundled advertising products. Over the last year or so, we’ve released a strong range of new multi-product, multi-channel advertiser bundles such as the Yellow Pages® print and digital bundles and the priority advertiser bundle that spans 1234, Citysearch® and Whereis®. These bundles combine different advertising products into a single package, making it easier for advertisers to broaden their reach and create advertising solutions that meet their specific needs.

A beautiful set of numbers
Recently, there have been some great votes of confidence for what we’re doing at Sensis.

I mentioned in a previous update that Sensis looked like receiving great results on the 2010 Corporate Responsibility Index. The CRI, if you’re unfamiliar with it, is run by the St James Ethics Centre and is used by many major Australian businesses to benchmark their sustainability performance. Well, the results are now in. Our first year entrant score of 79.44% (bronze) last year has grown substantially to 92.51% (gold) this year. This result includes platinum scores (a new rating for benchmark performance) in three of the total six areas: sustainability strategy; integration; and assurance and disclosure. This achievement is a real source of pride and is the result of a strong commitment to sustainability from everyone in the business.

Meanwhile, we continue to see fantastic growth in mobile usage. In June, Whereis® Mobile officially became our first mobile site to hit a million visits in a month². Our other mobile sites – like Yellow Pages® and White Pages® – are also doing well. In fact, the whole portfolio is now being visited more than 3 million times a month², which represents high double digit growth over last June and potentially a huge amount of new ROI for our advertisers.

And on a totally different topic, we’ve been working with Mission Australia on the ‘1234 Project’. For every person who clicks ‘like’ on the 1234 Project Facebook home page, Mission Australia will give a pair of socks to a person in need. Our initial target was 12,340 socks and, in less than a month, we’ve already reached it!

The Human Yellow Pages®
Finally, if you think this update is a long read, spare a thought for Tansel Ali. To prepare for the upcoming World Memory Championships, Tansel, who is our own Australian Memory Champion, has turned himself into something of a human Yellow Pages®. Tansel is attempting to memorise every display advertisement (business card size or larger) in the Sydney Yellow Pages® so that he can recite any business name or number. For the record, that’s 2,306 pages, more than 16,000 numbers and a hell of a lot of reading!

That’s an incredible feat Tansel. All the best for the Championships in China later this year.

Best wishes,

Bruce Akhurst

1: Roy Morgan Single Source Australia, April 2009 to March 2010. Base: Australians 14+
2: Omniture SiteCatalyst. June 2010

The revolution mobile technology is bringing to the way people find, buy and sell reminds me of the proverb “the more things change, the more they stay the same”.

What brought this to mind was a recent survey that found that maps are one of the most popular applications on mobile devices today. The comScore MobiLens survey identified an almost 70 per cent jump in the use of mobile mapping and direction services last year. In February this year, it found that more than 21 million people in the UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy used their phones for navigation.

If maps are such a useful and in demand application, it’s easy to understand why they are now a key selling feature for someone upgrading their handset.

No wonder Nokia is advertising free navigation on all of its new smartphones as a way of winning back market share lost to iPhone, Blackberry and phones with Google’s Android system.

In 1997, Sensis (then Pacific Access) kicked off market research into the concept of enhanced map routing from the static maps found on the Online White Pages® and Yellow Pages® sites.

The objective of this research was to understand how people planned journeys, used maps and their features, and what information would be required to provide a great experience. At the time this new technology was seen as a great feature to encourage usage of our online directories and also allowed us new page impressions on which to sell banner advertising.

The basics back then are much the same as today. People told us they wanted information about the best route and one that incorporated local knowledge. They told us that they wanted location specific information and really only needed help for parts of the journey they were not so familiar with.

But, with all the features from mapping, directions and turn by turn voiced navigation being provided free of charge, the subscription and advertising models of today are under pressure.

New ways of monetising the features will need to be developed. So we need to look back to see the future. Clues to what might be new advertising models might just lie in that 1997 research report on my desk.

Journeys aren’t just about getting from A to B, people want to do it safely, avoid incidents and have a smooth journey.

Features like real-time traffic and alternate routes can be sponsored, much the same as traffic reports are on the radio.

Users want to know information of value on their journey, such as fuel prices, where to eat, where to pick up some flowers or where to find an all night chemist.

Again, these features can be monetised through different advertising models.

Advertisers might pay to become navigation points on a map, just as our survey found13 years ago.

Special offers might encourage purchase along the journey, who wouldn’t stop at the convenience store for a cheap burger! If your planned travel is for a few hours drive, it’s likely you are going to want to eat at some stage.

Constant in all this change are our basic needs to complete a journey without fuss and bother. The tools to help us do this are getting more sophisticated and as a marketer, I am excited about the highly targeted opportunities we are going to be able to provide by knowing where an individual is, and where they are going, even the time of day they are travelling.

The chance to reach someone on the move and near your business seems much more exciting than someone with their feet up on the couch for the night.

Hi again, and thanks for taking the time to find out more about how Sensis is bringing buyers and sellers together. In today’s update you can read about a tasty new way to demonstrate the value of Yellow® Pages; kicking off the 2010 metro canvass; more new innovations to make life easier for buyers and sellers; the phenomenal growth of mobile; and some more great news about our commitment to sustainability.


8,500 guys and girls and a pizza place
In April, Sensis ran a ground-breaking campaign that really brought the value of Yellow Pages® to life. The campaign worked a bit like this. Team up with well-known Melbourne pizza chef, Tony Fazio. Open a restaurant offering free pizza for two weeks. Don’t tell anyone the address or phone number. Instead tell them to “look it up the way you would any other business”. Then sit back and watch the dough fly.

And fly it did. Over the campaign’s two weeks, over 8,500 calls were made to Hidden Pizza, with over 70% of the callers saying they found Hidden Pizza through the print, online and mobile Yellow Pages®. That’s a lot of pizza… and a great testament to the ability of Yellow Pages® to bring buyers to your door.

Yellow Pages® Metro Canvass is up and running
Our people are now out and about talking to businesses as part of the 2010 Yellow Pages® metropolitan canvass. This must be one of the largest customer engagement programs in Australia, with consultants all over Australia contacting more than half a million businesses over the next few months.

This year, we’ve got some great new products for our customers. These include a Brisbane version of the popular Yellow Pages® In the Car book, Yellow Pages® Online Gold Plus, which is a new advertising solution for businesses without a web site, and enhanced accountability through our metered ad program.

But, perhaps the most exciting new step is a range of bundles that make it even easier for our customers to advertise right across our network. As I’ve talked about before, Yellow Pages® has evolved from a print directory to a diverse and sophisticated advertising network spanning print, online, voice and mobile. These bundles make it easier for businesses to profile themselves to potential buyers right across the network.

From the labs
Of course, we’ve been busy delivering for buyers – the people who use our products – as well.

Firstly, we’ve launched more new features to make our digital services easier to use.

Recently, we reconfigured the Yellow Pages® Online search experience. To begin with, we’ve dropped the ‘business name’ and ‘business type’ radio buttons in favour of a more intuitive search. Now, you can search for a business name, like ‘Sensis’ without having to click a ‘business name’ search button. Instead Yellow Pages® Online will drop down suggested listings relating to Sensis for you to choose from. We’ve also re-built the business profile pages to give buyers easier access to more content. The results of this have been pretty immediate, with a significant reduction in nil result searches and a big rise in interaction: most notably in the number of business profile readers clicking on email links and image galleries.

We’ve also added a series of new features to the White Pages® Online site. White Pages® is all about finding people and businesses you already know, so it’s a fair bet that you’ll be wanting to find your White Pages® contacts over and over again. Recently, we made this easier with the ability to save your contacts to a new ‘My List’ feature on White Pages® Online. We also launched send to mobile, which lets you send your listing from White Pages® Online straight to your mobile to save in your contacts.  In May, we’ll be taking this a step further by launching a new ‘save and share’ feature. With save and share, you’ll be able to save your White Pages® contacts to your pages on Facebook and a wide range of other social networks.

Secondly, we’ve made our services easier to access with new additions to our network.

As you may know, Telstra recently released the home phone of the future, the T-Hub. This is great for buyers and sellers using our services because White Pages®, Yellow Pages® and 1234 (with Whereis® coming soon) are all easily accessible right where your phone is. Just one touch of the console and you’re searching. And when you find the result in Yellow Pages®, you don’t even have to dial… just click to call.

The Yellow Pages® enhanced location search on Whereis.com I mentioned last time is also delivering results. Yellow Pages advertisers are now being profiled on Whereis.com more than 8 million times a month: a number that’s been boosted by about 2 million since we launched the enhanced location feature . This is fantastic for both buyers and sellers. It means Whereis is playing a growing role in bringing buyers and sellers together, while improving the ROI we can offer Yellow Pages® advertisers.

Finally, we’ve also been busy in the mobile space.

We launched a new CitySearch® Mobile site, with an improved look and feel, expanded TV and Movies content, a new ‘Bars’ vertical and improved mapping functionality. And we also launched new Yellow Pages® and White Pages® apps for Android devices to complement the incredibly successful launch of our iPhone apps.

Mobile coming up trumps
On that note, mobile has been an incredible success story for the buyers and sellers who rely on our services. As I’ve mentioned before, mobile usage is growing at a rate of knots. Average monthly Yellow Pages® Mobile visits for the March quarter have doubled YoY yet again. When you look across our entire network, mobile now accounts for over 13% of our total digital (online and mobile) usage.

And smart phone apps are playing an enormous role in this exciting growth. iPhone apps account for something like half of our total Yellow Pages® Mobile and White Pages® Mobile usage and these two apps still sit in the lifestyle category Top 10 in Apple’s App Store … months after they were launched.

More great news on the sustainability front
As I mentioned last month, I’m really proud of the positive contribution being made by our sustainability initiatives; such as our directory recycling program and the decision to offset our carbon emissions through Greenhouse Friendly™ accredited providers and projects in Australia.

Now, we’ve taken this a step further with the release of a new book: Small Business, Big Opportunity: Sustainable Growth. This free book, which is a complement to our highly successful advertising guide, provides practical information on how businesses can reduce their impact on the environment and save money as well.

Small Business, Big Opportunity: Sustainable Growth has been written by Jon Dee, who is the Founder and Managing Director of the not-for-profit action group, Do Something, and the NSW Australian of the Year 2010. If you’d like to order a copy, just check out the Small Business section on our corporate web site.

And finally, in more good news on the sustainability front, I’m pleased to say that our efforts to support a more sustainable future are being acknowledged. Last year we joined the global Corporate Responsibility Index program for the first time. This program is run in Australia by the St James Ethics Centre and we were incredibly proud to achieve a ‘Bronze’ rating and Best New Entry Award in our first year. Since then, we’ve put a lot more work into our sustainability commitments and, as a result, I’m told we have lifted our result even higher this year. More on that next time, when the results are out.

Until then, all the best,

Is traditional media bowing before the online juggernaut? Don’t you believe it.

Well, trounce me with a tablet and tell me I’m a technophobe.

In contrast with the armies of ‘gurus’ claiming an increasingly irrelevant traditional media is on its knees begging for sweet mercy from the digerati, out come the following two reports.

In February, The Nielsen Company’s Australian Internet and Technology Report 2009 – 2010  found that “the continued increase in time spent online amongst Internet users has, overall, not been at the expense of other media.”

Nielsen found that, while, time spent online grew by over an hour in 2009, consumption of traditional media (like TV, radio and newspapers) actually grew as well.

Go figure!

In fact, Nielsen’s results over several years suggest that, while Internet users tend to spend less (but still substantial) time consuming traditional media than non Internet users, the actual time they spend with traditional media has remained pretty well flat for quite a few years now.

In other words, while time spent online has risen massively, time spent offline hasn’t fallen in response.

Then in March, way over the other side of the world, KPMG UK reported a similar kind of trend.

Their Media and Entertainment Barometer for March found that while time spent online grew by 74 minutes in the six months to March, traditional media consumption ALSO grew by 33 minutes.

So what?

I can’t help thinking there’s a really simple, but really important, message in this data.

That traditional and digital together is far more powerful than digital alone.

Digital media is a massive part of our lives today and will play an even bigger role in the future.

But it won’t be alone, because people want choice. They want a paper in their hands and on their mobiles. They want TV in their lounge and on their iPad.

And the more choice people get, the more media they consume.

In short, the future is everywhere, not just online.

Maybe we should put an end to these phoney media wars and start realising we’re all in this together.

Because, clearly, that’s what consumers (and advertisers) want.

With the end of the year almost upon us, Sensis’ CEO, Bruce Akhurst, provides his first bi-monthly update.

Hi.

I thought it might be good to end the year by starting something… a regular report that I hope will give you a deeper insight into how Sensis is working to improve the value we offer all Australians.

New ways to help you find, buy and sell
Sensis is committed to helping you find, buy and sell. Our services help you find the suppliers you need right when you need them. In doing this, we help thousands of local businesses find their lifeblood – customers.

Our innovation programs reflect this commitment. How can we make our services simpler and more informative for buyers? And how can we build the value and simplicity of our advertiser services?

On this front, we’ve been particularly busy in the last few weeks. We launched the White Pages® app for iPhone recently. I was very happy to see that it reached the #1 free app in Apple’s App Store very quickly. This caps off an exciting quarter for our mobile sites, with usage growing off the scale. We launched White Pages® Mobile four months ago and it’s already delivering over 400,000 visits a month¹. At about the same time, we also launched the Yellow Pages® iPhone app. Since then, Yellow Pages® Mobile usage has more than doubled to over 650,000 visits a month²… in just a few months!  Clearly, Australians are connecting with these new generation mobile services and that’s great for advertisers. Our network strategy means that Yellow Pages® advertisers – print and online – can be searched through mobile and therefore can benefit from mobile usage growth.

We’ve also recently commenced delivery of the 2009 Yellow Pages®. This year’s book includes a more informative front cover and an expanded information section. Both of these enhancements were specific requests from Australians who participated in research we conducted earlier this year.

In Yellow Pages® Online, we’ve recently launched a new advertiser product – Purely Mobile Business, or PMB. PMB is designed for mobile businesses, like mobile mechanics, looking to reach out to customers in the areas they service.

We also recently launched Category Search, which is a new product that lets advertisers combine Voice, Whereis® and Citysearch® advertising into a single, easy to use product. Response has been strong, with hundreds of customers choosing Category Search in just a few weeks.

The Whereis® team has just released 3D City Maps for GPS to sat nav equipment manufacturers. 3D City Maps bring the Sydney and Melbourne CBD areas to life by providing a real-time 3D city-scape. 3D City Maps should be launched in popular GPS units shortly, and more cities will be ‘3D’d’ in the near future.

Finally, MediaSmart – our online and mobile display advertising business – has released new targeting capabilities. Working closely with Telstra, we’ve developed a segmentation capability that ensures mobile display advertising is more relevant and targeted for both mobile users and advertisers… like helping a major bank deliver specific branch manager contact details to customers mobile phones based on their location. This is a genuinely unique capability and I’m pleased to say the support from marketers has been fantastic.

In the field
Right now, our Yellow Pages® regional and local consultants are out talking to advertisers, as are our White Pages® consultants. We’ve been backing them up with new products, comprehensive training and a much stronger focus on engaging with local communities.

This local focus led to the opening of a new office in Penrith on November 10 (with offices in Ballina and Coffs Harbour also opening soon). We were really pleased to open Penrith by announcing a new community partnership with Great Community Transport. At the same time, we’ve been increasing our support for local businesses by regularly sponsoring and speaking at local events – over 80 in the last few months.

1.5 million calls… and counting
If you ever wanted proof of the value of Yellow Pages®, here it is. As you may know, we’ve been running a metered ad program for two years now. This program helps advertisers track the number of calls they receive from Yellow Pages® print.

In January, we began monitoring the phone calls delivered by Yellow Pages® print to a small cross-section of display ad customers (a sample of less than 1% of our total customer base). By early November, the number of calls delivered to these customers by Yellow Pages® print passed the 1.5 million threshold!

Imagine how many valuable phone calls Yellow Pages® is delivering to all our advertisers. Imagine how many more enquiries there are when you add people who are bypassing the phone and visiting the store or office. And imagine how that number could grow even further if you included all the other Sensis and third party online, mobile and voice services that form the Yellow Pages® network.

Interesting movements in the advertising market
Recently, we’ve seen some interesting movements in the media sector. The September quarter IAB report showed 3.3% growth in the online advertising market compared to the September quarter last year³. While this is a marked slowdown on last year, the results were really buoying for Sensis, as they show we are growing our share of the market.

Another interesting observation comes from our Adstream business. Adstream sits at the centre of the ad industry by helping marketers, agencies and media outlets, like TV, radio and newspaper publishers, manage and distribute their ad content. We’ve seen renewed growth in enquiries to Adstream recently. Could this mean the ad industry’s on its way back?

Our people have spoken
The other day, we received the results of our latest employee opinion survey. This is a global survey undertaken by Towers Perrin and it covers some of Australia’s, and the worlds, largest companies. In the latest survey, Sensis exceeded the Australian norm (the average of all Australian companies) in every category. Our results also benchmarked well among the world’s best employers, with results in a number of categories exceeding global norms. This is fantastic news. We work hard to ensure Sensis is a great place to work for our present and future employees. These results tell us we’re on the right track.

Sensis Sustainability Report
Finally, if you’d like to know more about Sensis’ strategy, operations, performance and impacts, I’d recommend you check out the 2008/9 Sensis Sustainability Report, which has just been launched. You can download it today from our newly upgraded corporate site.

Until next time
So that’s it for now. Have a happy, relaxing and safe Christmas and New Year. I’ll be back to you with a further update in February. In the meantime, thanks for all your support. You can rest assured we’ll be pulling out all stops to keep improving our value to you.

1: Omiture Site Catalyst, November 2009;
2: ibid
3: PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Internet Advertising Bureau Online Advertising Expenditure Report, quarter ended September 2009.

Charles Wright recently wrote in The Age how the benefits of search engine optimisation (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) for one small business provided a far better return on investment (ROI) than advertising in the Yellow Pages®.

It’s easy to find one example of a business that’s been successful with any sort of advertising. The challenge is to find lots of them. Yellow Pages® has hundreds of examples of advertisers who get a majority of their business through Yellow Pages®. We even put some in our TV ad earlier this year.

Charles’ article was based on a simple assessment of ROI: cost of SEM outlay and the return in website traffic compared to the cost of advertising with Yellow Pages® Online and the subsequent website.

Where his case fell down is that it left out a number of costs a small business faces when gearing up for effective SEM and SEO activity.

These include the costs of building, hosting and maintaining a decent website, and possibly the cost of an SEO/SEM consultancy (or a significant time cost if you are able to do it yourself).

Sure there are online businesses that can manage all this and find customers. But there are a lot of businesses that can’t. Which is where the Yellow Pages® network can deliver real value.

Through its network, Yellow Pages® provides an effective multi-channel solution. With one Yellow Pages® ad, a business goes in the Yellow Pages® Book, Yellow Pages® Mobile, and the 1234 and Call Connect phone services.

In addition, Yellow Pages® also gives businesses a significant online presence by putting them in yellowpages.com.au, whereis.com and by making Yellow Pages® listings available to be searched on Google Maps and Bing Maps.

In fact, if you add up all these print, online, voice and mobile services, you find that Yellow Pages® advertiser content can be searched for through services used by almost 65% of Australians every month.

And that doesn’t include search engines. Recognising their significant value, we’ve made Yellow Pages® content not only searchable through the major search sites but we’ve optimised the content for search engines as well. That’s why over 2.5 million referrals come from search engines to Yellow Pages® Online every month.

People searching Yellow Pages® are buyers, not browsers. And they are often serious buyers who are ready to make a major purchase such as buying tyres for their car, booking an appointment with a dentist, booking a function at a restaurant or hiring a tradesman for work on their house.

The Yellow Pages® network helps puts businesses in more places customers are looking – including major online sites – with ease and convenience, leaving them to get on with running their business.

It was interesting to observe the Digital Gurus panel conversation about the role that mobile advertising and social media will play in the foreseeable future at Monday’s Digital Marketing & Media Summit in Melbourne, and to compare this to what’s been said recently at similar forums in Sydney and published in marketing journals. It seems Melbourne’s marketing community is still treading with quite a bit of caution, perhaps waiting to see what others are going to do before going for broke and full integrating mobile and social media into their digital strategies…

A couple of the panellists observed that rightly or wrongly, mobile is still viewed as a bit of a ‘bolt-on’ to traditional marketing strategies. Sensis’ Cheryl Vize and a representative from Google agreed that we’re only just starting to see what mobile can achieve in terms of its ability to target consumers by personal profile and location. A major travel provider said they still a way off viewing mobile as a viable means for booking travel. This is interesting considering research such as the Sensis e-business Report based released in August revealed that 31% of male mobile users and 26% of female mobile users are accessing the internet on their mobiles and 41% use it to look for information on products and services and 25% have used it for banking. So it seems (and Google made this point) that mobile has a growing role to play where functionality and utility meet the consumer. Sure there’s a role for brand campaigns on mobile, but there’s also a massive opportunity to make services available via the most convenient and personal medium around. Perhaps major service providers just need convincing that device functionality can offer their consumers an optimal user experience…hopefully their digital agencies were listening!

On the social media front, key players in the travel and health insurance industry are realistic in their views that consumers don’t want to be their ‘friends’, but there’s a growing trend towards communities of people wanting to talk about travel and healthcare/insurance matters…so by monitoring this activity, and perhaps even setting up the infrastructure for discussion forums etc, brands can benefit by learning from their comments in order to better understand their consumers’ wants and needs.

What about smaller businesses wanting to reach their consumers via their channels? Cheryl said she sees Sensis’ role into the future as collaborating with them to help them understand how all of the different advertising channels, including emerging channels like social media and mobile, can help them and guide them through the maze of options.

As everyone kept coming back to over the course of the day, it’s not about jumping on the latest trend for the sake of it. Any marketing strategy needs to start with an understanding of who your consumers are and where they are looking.